Bumblebee film concept art for the Decepticons and Bumblebee's battle mask

Ah darn I forgot to post the rest of the concept art here after I saw them up on the artist's Instagram, I'll make sure to post any other concept art though since I'm following just about every concept artist who worked on the film.

For my thoughts on the Bumblebee mask designs, the first one resembles a junk/gas mask to some degree, would like to see the "face" on a flamethrower or toxic based Decepticon like Oil Slick, Acid Storm or Sun Storm.


The other ones make for some nice pilot mask looking guys, maybe battle masks for Arial bots?

Whirl, is that you?

-Crossfire- wrote:
Whirl, is that you?

I was thinking that same thing

Bee has a hard hat

Ultra Markus wrote:Bee has a hard hat

1547180267-bbconcept8.jpg

*Gasp* head design for generic prewar Constructicons! (Not the group of 6 we know I mean a worker class with set designs like the Seekers)

Could also work as pre war miners or something.

Hmmmm, I actually like the far more insectoid and less "cute wasp" battle masks.

The Decepticons look AMAZING! Like something that walked out of Half Life: Episode 2. This just proves what some bold artistic risk balanced with practical design can achieve in the live action visual realm, and frankly makes all the vanilla G1 takes look boring and outdated by comparison. I realize the filmmakers didn't feel like they were "resigned" to recreating G1 onscreen, but with enough more GEEWUHN! in ALL of our evergreen pop culture franchise, we're all going to start feeling the burnout soon. This would have been a dose of fresh air to keep my hope alive. As it is, now we pretty much know what all of the characters are going to look like for the next several films at least (I mean, what's the risk they betray their G1 "mandate" so soon?).

Acolyte wrote:I realize the filmmakers didn't feel like they were "resigned" to recreating G1 onscreen, but with enough more GEEWUHN! in ALL of our evergreen pop culture franchise, we're all going to start feeling the burnout soon.

We'll be sure to check in with you when that happens.

My hot take? That's exactly what happened with the old movies. Designs that were confusing to follow in motion. Designs that made crowd scenes unintelligible. Designs that made following characters between scenes difficult ("Is he the one from before?").

Bumblebee's currently rocking a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That's more than the previous four films combined.

If you want to tell stories that feature the robots as characters, you need to make them personable and easily identifiable. That's what they did.

Bumblebee’s fourth battle mask actually looks really cool, I think I prefer the one in the movie, though.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I feel that this movie going for a more heavily G1-inspired look for its robot cast was kind of a necessary move to bring back audience familiar with the classic G1 looks after TLK had burned its audiences so much.

TLK was not the success it was anticipated to have been, so the Bumblebee movie really needed to do something new to really shake things up and pull audiences back in. And what with this movie already being a love letter to the pop culture of the 1980s, what better way to capitalize on that 80s nostalgia than to try for some 80s Transformers nostalgia?

It's actually a pretty smart move when you think about it. Giving people something familiar to reel them in, kinda like what The Force Awakens did with its many homages (both thematic and conceptually) to A New Hope.

Sabrblade wrote:You know, the more I think about it, the more I feel that this movie going for a more heavily G1-inspired look for its robot cast was kind of a necessary move to bring back audience familiar with the classic G1 looks after TLK had burned its audiences so much.

TLK was not the success it was anticipated to have been, so the Bumblebee movie really needed to do something new to really shake things up and pull audiences back in. And what with this movie already being a love letter to the pop culture of the 1980s, what better way to capitalize on that 80s nostalgia than to try for some 80s Transformers nostalgia?

It's actually a pretty smart move when you think about it. Giving people something familiar to reel them in, kinda like what The Force Awakens did with its many homages (both thematic and conceptually) to A New Hope.

Yet people had a go against The Force Awakens for that reason

I have to say, I was always confused when people said they couldn't follow the action as I could perfectly. I know its my opinion but I've always had trouble understanding that criticism.

Although... Imagine if they made Bumblebee 2 take place in the 90s and had the cast sporting their G2 colour schemes and looks Though using G2 Turbo masters and Predator Jets as cast would get around continuity issues Sky quake or Clench could fit in the main villain role quite easily.

The child of BM Strika and Obsidian

some of those robots kind of give me robocop ED-209 mixed with some of the many terminators from Salvation vibe

Well here is some more Bumblebee concept art, this time from multiple people.

First we will start with an artist who has already shared art with us, Joshua Viers also known as conceptbyjosh, he has shared some early Decepticon head designs which eventually led to Dropkick's final head design, you can see the whole "speaker" mouth concept was planned for at least awhile as according to the description in the instagram post.

"Quick Decepticon head concepts for #bumblebeemovie . The director had some specific ideas that were fun to play with."

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bsgxja1lnws/

Although the final design looks great itself and probably fits more with the "G1" like designs of the other characters these ones are still good looking on their own.










Compare with the final version in the film.




Next up we have another concept artist Thomas Pringle (Pringleart) who has done work on Transformers in the past, recently The Last Knight but has done other projects such as A Quiet Place and Star trek Discovery.

Only one art piece for now with presumably more to come but probably the most revealing one, art for a frozen Megatron with a different design, not quite G1 inspired like the ones in the final film or as describe by those who saw the Test Screenings in March but it is a much more rounded design and certainly one that clashes with the depiction in the 2007 film.

Much more is that the date for the art piece is 2017, 03, 28 which is March 28 in 2017, so they were possibly toying with reboot or redesign ideas before The Last Knight even hit theaters, this is a good example of how much time it takes to develop the behind scenes and development art for movies and a good reason why for Hasbro's movie toys tend to draw from concept art rather then final film stuff.

Even further backed up by the description on Instagram.

"A concept i did for the Bumblebee movie a few years back."



Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/BsgCY2sFc21/


The final art for today comes from artist Tim Flattery who has done some work for previous Transformers films such as The Last Knight and even the original 2007 film not to mention his other work.

There is a lot of photos so I'll only post a few after the description but from top to bottom we have art for the "arm thing" that Bumblebee drops from his undercarriage when Charlie first works on him in her garage in the film.

Then we have have our first look at the "Allspark mutations" that were originally supposed to be in the film when Bumblebee accidentally got "Allspark Engergy" on the electronics in Charlie's house causing them to come to life and trash the house, ultimately despite the props for the creatures having been made and the scenes presumably filmed with other reports that Martin Short was to lend his voice to the scene, it was cut from the film and instead Bumblebee trashes the house all on his own, however one element of the film remained in an odd line from Charlie's Mom about why the Tv cord was cut.

Then we have some art and some pictures of the props for a couple of Sector 7's equipment in the film, first we get a look at the Harpoon guns that were used multiple times in the film at the start and the end, then we get a look at the "Electric Gun" that Sector 7 use to disable Bumblebee at one point in the film and Charlie used to "revive" Bumblebee after Dropkick shot and left him for dead, this electric gun resembles a Grenade tube launcher somewhat.

Finally we see some pics of a Bumblebee head and chest prop with notable focus on the "eye" design.

The source comes from his website http://www.timflattery.com/work/bumblebee/ and I'll post one picture for each of the concepts that I just talked about.












Final art, although this has been up for a bit I couldn't find any page sources for the art itself but according to others the art is from Mark Yang who did do some work for The Last Knight and it fits his art style so it's probably true.

So while I wouldn't add it to a news article until the source is found I wanted to share the art regardless, these are near final designs for Blitzwing, Shatter and Dropkick with only some slightly different proportions and different but very similar head designs to the final film.

Although Tfwiki has the art on their page for the artist so maybe they have a real source
https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Mark_Yang

Ah just as I finish submitting that post I find on Tfw2005 more of Thomas Pringle's art including a bigger pic of the Megatron pic, although no source is listed in the post I found it on and I can't find anything on Thomas's sites and accounts which was the same case with Mark Yang's work.

But here are some pics including early looks at scenes like Bumblebee running from S7 in his WW2 look from TLK which is either what Bee was originally going to look like or it was a placeholder, notably as shown in the art itself and in the art name the beginning was originally going to take place in Vietnam. (I heard some thing about Vietnam in one of the posts from one of the March Test screening watchers but I don't remember the exact quote.)














Can I just say Megatron looks absolutely huge here compared to 2007?

Design changes are the least bit worrying regarding continuity look at aligned I think the idea was that Bumblebee was meant to be something of a last hurrah for that timeline and that a reboot was always planned (just not as soon as they first wanted) to allow the franchise to blend in seamlessly with the other hasbro movies that are being planned.

That said, a smaller cast of characters and a smaller budget with a tight script is probably the best way to handle tf movies at the moment, to gather momentum again.

ZeroWolf wrote:Design changes are the least bit worrying regarding continuity look at aligned I think the idea was that Bumblebee was meant to be something of a last hurrah for that timeline and that a reboot was always planned (just not as soon as they first wanted) to allow the franchise to blend in seamlessly with the other hasbro movies that are being planned.

That said, a smaller cast of characters and a smaller budget with a tight script is probably the best way to handle tf movies at the moment, to gather momentum again.

Yup a 2007 style film would probably help in regards to main robot cast, not including minor or background characters like most of the characters in the intro sequence on Cybertron in the film, I think those are fine, this also doesn't include any cannonfodder, Autobot or Decepticon. (I would love to see some Autobot fodder, not in large numbers but like 4-5 extra guys compared to the Autobots, don't even need to kill em all either)

I think a good balance of 6 Autobots (I hate 5 man bands, I hate this concept in the Transformers tv shows) and 7-8 Decepticons (Just a little more to "outnumber" the Autobots but still keep the cast tight and focused) is decent enough, it would help if there was only like 3-4 main humans including military
so that there is enough focus on the Transformers and their story assuming that it takes place on Earth.


As much as I liked the human characters in 2007 I think it was a bit much to have Sam and his family and school "friends", the Military, the Hacker group and Sector 7 plots all over the place, just one or two bystanders and the military/Sector 7 type group is enough.

As for the robot casts themselves they should comprise of half familiar G1 characters and half obscure (Unicron trilogy, etc) and "new" characters, I have no problem with visiting old characters as long as we get new characters/ideas with them.

How cool would it be to have an Autobot cast of Prime, Bee, Prowl, Ironhide, Hot Shot, Arcee, Strongarm, Medix/First Aid/Red Alert (Armada) and some Autotroopers/Generic Autobots like the Bumblebee Cybertron scene (That blue Ironhide/Ratchet looked crisp) vs a Decepticon cast of Starscream, Soundwave (and minions), Barricade, Slipstream, Skywarp, Thundercracker, Bludgeon, Flatline, Flamewar and a small squad of Seekers and Battlechargers/Vehicons.

I only have the generic characters there so we can avoid killing important characters as much as possible but we know the audience is gonna want action and at times the action might get a little boring without some awesome robot deaths. (I mean it's war, people die and such, the films should take more advantage of being allowed to tell more mature stories by exploring war and the internal conflicts it has.)

(I would like to avoid the token female Trope, I'd prefer multiple female Transformers or none at all)

The next movie should be a tad bigger in cast since Transformers is an ensemble cast type property and doesn't work as well for solo Superhero style movies with only Prime and Bumblebee being exceptions that would work with an audience. (A Dinobot, Wrecker, {insert name of combiner/other team here} is still an ensemble cast movie even if the focus was on a small squad of characters.)

With Bumblebee comfortably enjoying its fourth weekend in American theaters, fellow Seibertronian Sabrblade has made us aware that Bumblebee’s success has not been limited to the critical-sphere. Far from it, for a recent statement from Viacom CEO Robert M. Bakish has cemented Bumblebee as a financial success.

Speaking at the Citi TMT West Conference in Las Vegas this last Wednesday, Bakish made explicit reference to Bumblebee’s success, and that it had proven “solidly profitable”. Bakish specifically compared Bumblebee to 2017’s infamous The Last Knight, which had lost over $100 million domestically. As recorded by Box Office Mojo, Bumblebee currently stands at a domestic gross of over $100 million with a $135 million budget, with an additional $307 million grossed worldwide. Though relatively low compared to early films in the franchise, Bumblebee does appear to be steering the franchise back towards profitability.

With Bumblebee still running strongly in theaters, only time will tell how far it climbs. Fortunately for fans of the films, it appears that these earnings only further reaffirm the franchise's continuation into the foreseeable future.

Please lead to Beast Wars movie, please lead to Beast Wars movie, please lead to Beast Wars movie, please lead to Beast Wars movie... And also a reboot because this movie is too different from Bay's universe, and it'd be nice to see a new cinematic Transformers universe

For all the hype that surrounds the movie........, I hate to admit....., this can’t even beat any of the 5 bayverse movies. I wouldn’t say worst, but the most on par.

Blitzwing was so short lived. Luckily it’s not Starscream. But it was definitely a missed opportunity that Knight didn’t make use of the story of SS , instead of Biltzwing, damaging Bumblebee’s voice cord and having BB seeking revenge in the next movie.

The sparks between Charlie and BB also can’t be compared to Sam and BB’s. I really hate to admit...., but the bond between man and machine was so much fun and interesting in Bay’s TF than in Knight’s.

The fights between the bots were very unrealistic, i.e. one can easily twist the plot to make either the bot or the cons win. It’s very obvious that BB can’t possibly beat any of the cons, and at times, can easily be killed. but it managed to win all the battles.

What about the rumours on the show focusing more on the story of the bots and transformation? To me, I don’t find myself knowing more about BB or the cons. The transformation was also very minimal.

The G1 looking of the bots are really not bad, much much better than the insects-looking things in bayverse. Except, why still give us a ‘Grandma-on-pacifier’ looking BB?

.....I really, really hate to admit....., but I will still watch TF 1 to 5 over and over again, but this Bumblebee movie, it will be the first and the last time...